Windows build?

[BatmanAoD]

Does Oil build on Windows? If so, does it require MinGW with standard NIX-y tools (make, cc, etc), or is there a way to build it with Visual Studio components?

(I tried looking for "Windows" and "MinGW" in the issues list, but didn't see anything.)

[andychu]

I haven't tried it myself, but someone told me it works fine on Windows subsystem for LInux:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Oil-Deployments

(Windows 10 I believe).

I guess that doesn't use MinGW, but it's like an Ubuntu distro on top of a Windows kernel.

I think you need the kernel components too? It has to be something like Cygwin I think, not MinGW because that is just tools and no kernel emulation?

So basically pre-Windows 10 I would expect you need Cygwin, but I haven't tried it.

[BatmanAoD]

Yeah, getting stuff to work on the Subsystem for Linux should be pretty trivial! But that doesn't actually mean that the resulting binary will actually be usable outside the subsystem itself (i.e. you can't just invoke it from the Windows command shell).

I more or less despise Cygwin, so I probably won't look into building it that way, but I may at some point look into whether there's some way to compile with native Windows tools. From a brief glance, it looks like the main thing that's needed is libc. MinGW might provide the necessary translations to the corresponding MSVCRT methods, or maybe we need some platform-specific #ifdefs. Either way, I don't think this should be insurmountable!

[andychu]

I'm not sure how you would do fork() and exec() that way. MSVCRT doesn't have those as far as I know. They're not really part of ANSI C but POSIX.

I think you would end up just writing a tiny Cygwin...

Anyway since this isn't that specific a task, let's discuss any further on #oil-dev on Zulip:

https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/121539-oil-dev

(you can log in with Github)

Others might chime in. Happy to discuss more.

Although I suppose there is a native build of bash for git on Windows? I haven't ever used that but that's what I heard. I'm not sure how it works.

[BatmanAoD]

@89z If you like PowerShell's somewhat "object-oriented" pipe rules, may I suggest taking a look at Nushell?